One of Saturday Night Live’s most notorious former stars has turned his radio show into a regular platform for his business partner, cushion and conspiracy hawker Mike Lindell, amplifying the Trump-loving MyPillow founder and his unfounded claims about the election, Twitter “censorship,” and the deadly Capitol insurrectionist riot.
Between the early 1980s and the early 2010s, Joe Piscopo went from SNL fan favorite to punchline—but resurrected his career in 2014 with Piscopo in the Morning, a four-hour block on AM 970, a talk-radio station popular with New York City commuters. Since the election of now-former President Donald Trump, Piscopo’s guests have often been a mix of dubious conservative commentators and more mainstream figures like former NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly. By 2018, his show had climbed into the top 50 most-streamed and most influential radio programs in the country, according to an industry poll.
In 2021, and particularly after Trump supporters rioted at the Capitol on Jan. 6, Piscopo has repeatedly given airtime in the largest U.S. media market to Lindell, even though such hard-right outlets like Newsmax had by then sought to block the MyPillow magnate from making his outrageous claims on their air.
ADVERTISEMENT
Undisclosed in these recurring appearances is that Piscopo and Lindell have been business partners for several years. In 2017, the duo launched a supplement line called “Nutrajoe,” for which Lindell filed and obtained the trademarks. The product was marketed via infomercial, much like MyPillow, and promoted on Lindell’s corporate Twitter account. The company remains an active concern, according to Minnesota corporate filings, though its website appears defunct.
Representatives for Piscopo and Lindell did not respond to requests for comment about the latter’s appearances on the former’s show, nor about their ongoing business relationship.
“The antifa that I believe was already there, they started early on that, and actually I have videos of Trump supporters trying to hold back the guy who was breaking the first window,” Lindell said on Piscopo’s show on Jan. 7, when he was brought on as a reliable eyewitness to testify to the supposed involvement of leftist protesters in the mob—a notion federal investigators have discounted. “It was started by antifa. Antifa did it.”
Not only did Piscopo not challenge Lindell’s claims, but he lauded him as a “great patriot” and echoed his assertions that the right-wing extremists dressed in paramilitary gear were in fact undercover left-wing agitators.
Lindell then pivoted into his favorite topic: the fantasy that an elaborate international conspiracy rigged the November election for President Joe Biden, allegations that court after court threw out in the weeks following the vote.
“You got 80 million people Joe, that know this election, or 100 million people that know this election was stolen from them,” Lindell said. “I know it personally, I’ve seen the evidence.”
The MyPillow CEO went on to assert without any proof that dead people and minors had provided Biden’s margin of victory in an unspecified state.
“It’s like a bad SNL sketch, man,” Piscopo exclaimed, a remark apparently intended as approving.
Baseless allegations of election fraud were a theme Lindell returned to in a subsequent appearance on the show on Jan. 21—days after he went to the White House to present a proposal to the lame-duck Trump for imposing martial law. The pillow mogul reiterated his claims that foreign actors and voting machine manufacturer Dominion manipulated the vote totals, an assertion which has led to threats of legal action from the latter.
“I’m not backing down, I’m going to keep going until these machines are exposed,” Lindell said, interspersing his speculations with allegations that Dominion pressured multiple retailers into dumping his product. “This is so massive, you will never ever be able to have elections with machines. Eighty-five percent of them were online, they went over to five different countries. We actually have the forensic footprint that’s inside now.”
“My No. 1 purpose on this planet is to get these machines so we never use them again, and we get this fraud, fraudulent election exposed, and these countries attacked us,” Lindell said, near the conclusion of his 15-minute-long rant.
The Trump White House’s own lawyers rejected Lindell’s notions less than a week prior, but Piscopo backed Lindell up.
“These machines, they really seem—how, how did we end up with these machines? Why are we using these machines?” the host wondered. “Thanks for your patriotism, thanks for your faith, thanks for being the great person you are, Mike Lindell.”
The conversation only turned more paranoid when Lindell returned the morning of Jan. 26, a day after Twitter permanently banned him from its platform. There, the unhinged pillow manufacturer offered a preview of the strange claims he’d make on Tucker Carlson’s show that night: namely, that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey had taken control of Lindell’s account in the days previous to the ban.
“Twitter was running my Twitter account and acting like they were Mike Lindell,” Lindell claimed. “These guys were putting up posts that my friends knew I would not put up. That was Jack Dorsey doing this stuff behind the scenes trying to destroy me.”
Unlike Carlson, who that night struck an agnostic attitude and declined to endorse or deny his guest’s insane claims, Piscopo offered his sympathies—which he bizarrely coupled with a product promotion.
“Oh my gosh, you know what Mike, thank you, because I called you,” Piscopo said in response. “I cannot believe they did this, and I’m telling everybody to go out and get as many MyPillows as they possibly can.”
Lindell then pivoted to the subject of his “100-percent evidence” of “machine fraud,” to which Piscopo joined in expressions of amazement and support.
“We have affidavits, you see video, and now you’re telling us that mathematically the numbers were in fact stolen or just plain not recorded,” Piscopo said, citing supposed proof that was retracted or rejected in multiple courts.
